What makes a great documentary?

I work in a building with some of the greatest, most creative documentary filmmakers in Canada, so I decided to put the question to them.

Here are some of their answers:

A great documentary crafts a compelling cinematic portrait of the heart and soul of people’s lives and inspires us to see the world with greater clarity and compassion. Great documentaries remind us that our lives are complex, tragic, funny and magnificent and that it’s always worth waking up for another kick at the can.

A good doc, in my opinion, must have the following: a subject anchored in a local story that is universal; a story arc comprising a seductive opening, a taut rising action, an unexpected but mind altering climax, a hopeful but not maudlin denouement; unforgettable characters who reveal everything and are “real”; a visually stunning backdrop that mirrors the emotional stakes; a short end credit roll.

What makes a great documentary? More animation! Seriously. Documentarists want to change the minds and preconceptions of audiences, right? Be subversive; seduce audiences – with brilliant, artful animation – into enjoying themselves and being vulnerable, dropping their defenses (and defensiveness), then make your point and transform them. As evidence, I offer up Persepolis, Waltz With Bashir, Drawn From Memory (Paul Fierlinger), Ann Marie Fleming’s upcoming I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, or the subtle brilliance of Sweden’s Jonas Odell (Never Like the First Time) or UK filmmaker Jonathan Hodgson (Camouflage).

The story stays with you for days on end …and you continue to reflect on what you learned, why you laughed, why you cried and what you need to change in your own life or perhaps there’s just that one small action that you need to take. A good documentary raises the stakes in ethical accountability and you are compelled to seek out and to create stories that are even more thoughtful, even more considerate, highly original and creative. When you watch a good doc you know that the artist is telling a story that she wants to tell and has to tell and not a story that she thinks she’s supposed to tell.

A great documentary has the quality of fiction — it evokes something larger than the particular story or characters at hand, and lingers in our memory. Too often, a documentary is a super-efficient information machine — but visually unimaginative, conceptually unoriginal and simply ‘about’ something without being something of value in and of itself. Grierson’s definition is still the best: ‘the creative interpretation of reality’. Don’t forget the ‘creative’ and ‘interpretation’ part.

Find out how some of the other great documentary minds answer this question by checking out our Capturing Reality site, which hosts a collection of interview clips on the genre with some of today’s most well-known filmmakers.

Documentary films are as varied as the subject they cover and the approach to the production of each one must be specifically designed to consider the essence of the subject, be it a human drama, adventure, history, science, nature or everyday life. While certain basic rules in documentary film production are common denominators in all of them, each production must remain focused. Straying from the core subject withh too much chatter- too many irrelevant scenes does not make a good documentary.

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